He Stopped Loving Her Today: George Jones, Billy Sherrill, and the Pretty-Much Totally True Story of the Making of the Greatest Country Record of All Time

20. Collaboration and Compilation

168 coLLaboraTIonandcompILaTIon Here I come to save the day! —mighty mouse Why do we capitalize the word “I”? There’s no grammatical reason for doing so, and oddly enough, the majuscule [capital letter] “I” appears only in English. —caroline winter, New York Times Magazine Now back to the big picture. Whether “He Stopped Loving Her Today” took a month or a year to produce, the finished recording ended up being a collaboration—like most recordings. To make the greatest country record of all time, George Jones needed Billy Sherrill who needed Pig Robbins who needed Ron “Snake” Reynolds who needed Charlie McCoy who needed Millie Kirkham who needed Bobby Braddock and Curly Putman who needed Jerry Carrigan and on and on. Like Hillary said, “It takes a village.” “I think toward the end when they’re all playing is one of those strange blessings you get when everybody’s playing and nobody’s clashing with each other,” said Sherrill. “Everybody in the record was complementing the other person. And they were all complementing Jones.” A collaboration. Second, “He Stopped Loving Her Today,” like most recordings , was a compilation of musical elements, a sound mosaic created in the studio by Billy Sherrill and the engineers. “Virtually all recorded music is the product of studio manipulation ,” wrote New York Times reporter Jon Pareles. “Classical albums are typically pieced together from the best of multiple takes of a work; even live albums, classical and popular, are often 20 Collaboration and Compilation 169 patched up to correct wrong notes. Most popular music is created on multi-track tape that allows dozens of separate elements to be perfected and combined.” (How did you do that?) “Back then, you just punch in on tracks,” said engineer Ron “Snake” Reynolds. “You take this track over here you got and you’ll take and lift a sequence out of that, punch it in to another track where another vocal is. And you go on down a little ways and you take another track, punch into that track.” “You make what was called then, and still is, I guess, a ‘comp track,’” continued Reynolds. “It’s a compilation vocal track. You get this one master track you’re working with and he may come in and sing next month and we’ll pull a line out of that and put it in that comp track.” Mind you all this punching was done by hand and required a certain amount of manual dexterity. “You had to be quick,” said Reynolds. So the songs we love were and are most often created from pieces—parts, a little of this and a little of that, all assembled— “perfected and combined”—in the final mix by the producer and engineers. So how long does it take to put everything together, to mix an average song? “Anywhere from an hour-and-a-half to three hours to mix a record for us old school guys,” said Reynolds. “Some of the new school guys will take a day or so, or even longer.” “There are some really bizarre stories, like Mutt Lang [Shania Twain’s then producer-husband] and Shania Twain,” continued Reynolds. “It took ’em six weeks to mix ten songs.” Once the compilation is done, what you end up with is the illusion of a continuous, spontaneous performance. An “illusion” because the song as heard on the recording was never performed live in quite the same way. This whole collaboration/compilation thing is hard to get a handle on. We Americans love our heroes. We want stars to worship, celebrate, and, yes, write about. That’s how the stories get told. Did you hear the one about the brash young singersongwriter who battled Music Row, country radio, Big Foot, and The Making of “He Stopped Loving Her Today” 170 the Loch Ness Monster before getting her groundbreaking new single out to an adoring public? The very American emphasis on individual achievement, the prototypical one-mouse-can-makea -difference, “here-I-come-to-save-the-day” story is such an established and powerful cliché that it’s almost like we’re programmed to believe it. But the truth is Ben Franklin didn’t discover electricity and Edison didn’t invent the light bulb. The word “electric” was coined more than a century before Franklin was even born and that kite thing, if it really happened, likely would have lit him up like...